Computers and their application programs are used in all aspects of business, industry and academic endeavors. In recent years, there has been a technological revolution driven by the convergence of the data processing industry with the consumer electronics industry. This advance has been even further accelerated by the extensive consumer and business involvement in the Internet. As a result of these changes it seems as if virtually all aspects of human productivity in the industrialized world requires human/computer interaction. The computer industry has been a force for bringing about great increases in business and industrial productivity. Almost every week seems to bring computer industry advances which promise even further increases in productivity. These advances offer to drive down business and industry costs and increase efficiency, in addition to increasing productivity. In addition, the cost of "computer power" continues to drop as result of rapid advances in computer related technologies.
Despite all of these advantages, there still remains great resistance in all industries and business fields to new computer systems and significant system upgrades which offer much in productivity increases. This resistance results from past experience which equates to installing new computer systems or significant upgrades in existing systems with large amounts of down time, during which the business, manufacturing facility or individual worker functions are inoperative or operate at diminished levels. When a business or production facility is trying to decide whether to install a new or significantly upgraded computer system, the concern about down time, the possible loss of business as well as stress on the workers involved, very often outweighs the cost of the installation in influencing the decision. The concern about business and production delays resulting from installation has become so great that fewer and fewer small businesses are trying to make system and program changes on their own. The professional computer service industry which carries out and supports installations and upgrades for the business and industrial sector has been rapidly expanding over the past decade. However, even with such computer professional support the threat of such down time coupled with the costs of such professional services caused by installation delays remains of great concern.
In order to make computer installation and all aspects of human/computer interfacing less confusing, there is a need to make computer directed activities easier to understand for a substantial portion of the world's population, which, up to a few years ago, was computer illiterate, or, at best, computer indifferent. For the vast computer supported market places to continue and be commercially productive it will be necessary for a large segment of computer indifferent consumers to be involved in computer interfaces. Thus, the challenge of our technology is to create interfaces to computers which are as close to the real world as possible. Nowhere is this challenge more vital than in the installations of computer and computer networking systems for small businesses. In this marketplace, we are dealing with a group whose available time is being stressed to its limits by the pressures of current economic systems. Even though the computer systems procurable by these business people may offer their eventual salvation to their other business stresses, the prospect of a new computer installation is often quite ominous to them. Salespeople offering new systems may be met with phrases like, "We don't have the time to hack around with the computer; we have got to make a buck.".
This view has a reasonable validity. The giant computer industries of today arose over the past 60 years out of a small and esoteric group of specialists who developed their own jargon when referring to computer functions. Unfortunately, when the consumer industry of today evolved with hundreds of millions of potential computer systems consumers, these terms and their like successors, e.g. "meg, gig, RAM, frag, backup" and an infinite number of pseudonyms, still dominate the consumer end of the business. All of this is quite threatening to many in small businesses and makes them resist their inevitable computerization.